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Vice President of the National Education Association Lily Eskelsen spoke to a packed auditorium at Bowie High School on Friday night during an El Paso Teachers Association forum to discuss the EPISD cheating scheme. (Vanessa Monsisvais / El Paso Times)

Lack of funding and pressure to meet the federal accountability standards were underlying factors in the El Paso Independent School District cheating scandal, education experts and state politicians said Friday at a forum.

The education forum by the El Paso Teachers Association, "Social Justice in Public Education: A Call to Action from Ground Zero," featured panel discussions by education experts and state representatives who are seeking solutions for the "testing regime."

The panel comprised Lily Eskelsen, vice president of the National Education Association; El Paso Teachers Association President Norma De La Rosa; state Reps. Marisa Márquez and Joe Moody; state Sen. José Rodríguez; and Kathy Staudt, a political science professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.

More than 400 students, parents and educators attended the forum Friday. It continues at 8 am. today at Bowie High School.

De La Rosa said community input and awareness are needed so that such a cheating scheme does not happen again.

The district is at the center of a cheating scandal that targeted students who were economically disadvantaged and had limited English-speaking skills. To inflate standardized test scores, former Superintendent Lorenzo García and other district administrators prevented students from taking the exams by promoting them, pushing them out of school and preventing them from enrolling.

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"The bashing has been done. We've already heard the rhetoric about the school board and what happened to García, but that's not what we are here for today," De La Rosa said. "We are here to move forward to start the healing process and seeing what we need to do to make sure that what happened never happens again."

Questions from the audience focused on what residents could do to make sure the state provides educators sufficient money and other resources.

Rodríguez answered that more people needed to vote and mentioned the city's usual low voter turnout. In November, 174,789 voters -- 46 percent of all registered voters -- cast ballots in El Paso.

In response to the cheating scandal, lawmakers have proposed solutions that would hold the district accountable for its actions.

Márquez has proposed a bill that would change the Texas Constitution to allow the recall of school board trustees.

Rodríguez has introduced proposals in the 83rd Legislature that would require the district to offer remedial classes and have alternative graduation options for students who were victims of the cheating scheme.

REPORTER

Alex Hinojosa

Mark Mendoza, director of the Alpha Initiative, aimed at helping students who were victims of the scheme, said the district already offers options for former students to get diplomas or GEDs. More than 70 students have been identified. A forensic audit of the EPISD to determine how widespread the cheating was has been expanded to include all schools in the Priority Schools Division.

But Rodríguez said that those options don't seem to be effective enough at all and that more needs to be done.

"I understand they are doing something," he said. "But every time I read an article in the newspaper about a forum, there are always students that come forward and say, 'I was affected and no one contacted me.' I want to make sure that we have something in place that assures the students something can be done for them."

Some of the problems that helped fuel the scandal are the state's stringent requirements on standardized testing and $5.2 billion in education cuts that were made by lawmakers last year, Eskelsen said.

She added that the current testing system discourages creative thinking skills and the fine arts and encourages a factorylike system, in which managers are given bonuses for bullying their employees and in which workers are underpaid.

"If the purpose of education is to pass a standardized test, then our students will be ready to succeed in a world where art, science, politics, businesses and technology is creating good jobs for workers, who when given four choices, are really good at guessing the right answer," Eskelsen said.

"Unfortunately, that world is not Earth. We would have to fully fund the space program to send out students to a planet that would have that and that would be expensive."

Alex Hinojosa may be reached at ahinojosa@elpasotimes.com; 546-6137.

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What: "Social Justice in Public Education: A Call to Action from Ground Zero" forum.